Likewise, commercial enterprises were able to appropriate Pocahontas
in order to sell their products. In 1889 the Cameron and Sizer
Cigarette Company of Richmond, Virginia offered a Pocahontas "color
picture premium" in packs of its cigarettes. The card depicts
a half-naked Pocahontas saving John Smith from several dark brown
figures wielding clubs below a formal portrait of Pocahontas dressed
in a 17th century hat and square lace collar. The transformation
presented here seems to be the point: the subject has gone from
barefoot heathen to proper English lady in just a few years. On
the back of the card the sponsor promises "A Complete Pictorial
History of America, in serial cards..." Others in the series
include Columbus, Magellan, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Smith, "Puritan
Woman", and "English Country Man, Settler 1614."
John Rolfe didn't make this list apparently. The "Pictorial
History of America" is interesting in that it implicitly
defines "American History" as those events before the
American Revolution. Perhaps the painful years of Reconstruction
were not the time to commemorate more recent history, especially
in Richmond. In that case, Pocahontas must have had a particularly
benign appeal as a face from the far-distant past as well as a
conciliatory representation of the racial "other."